Abbatial House, Abbey of St Ouen, Rouen

Details

John Sell Cotman (1782-1842)
Abbatial House, Abbey of S^t Ouen, Rouen
signed and dated 'J S Cotman 1824' (lower left)
pencil, watercolour, heightened with bodycolour and with scratching out
16¼ x 22¼ in. (41.3 x 56.5 cm.)

Provenance

Painted for the Reverend C.P. Burney, but retained by the artist.
Purchased from the artist by Charles Turner of Norwich.
A.E. Alston and by descent to
J.D. Alston; Sotheby's, London, 10 July 1986, lot 133.
with Spink-Leger, London.

Literature

A.E. Alston, J.S. Cotman's Abbatial House, Information Sheet, 1922. M. Rajnai, John Sell Cotman, Drawings of Normandy in Norwich Castle Museum, Suffolk, 1975, pp. 82-3.

Exhibited

Norwich, Society of Artists, 1824, no. 94;
Possibly, London, Society of Painters in Water-Colour, 1825, no. 105.

Special notice

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Lot Essay

The Abbatial House of the Royal Abbey of St Ouen is represented in reverse in this watercolour. The present picture was a product of a combination of two factors in Cotman's life, his visits to Rouen in 1817, 1818, and 1820 and his return to Norwich from Yarmouth in 1820. In order to re-establish himself in East Anglian artistic life Cotman exhibited a series of extraordinarily highly-worked watercolours of Normandy at the Norwich Society in 1823 and 1824. Cotman never saw the Abbatial House himself and the drawing is presumably based upon the engraving of the house by in J.F. Pommeraye's Histoire de l'Abbaye de St Ouen, 1662, a copy of which was in the library of Dawson Turner, Cotman's patron.

Cotman painted the subject three more times, one of which is in the collection of Norwich Castle Museum. Cotman referred to it as the 'best subject I ever touched upon.' He exhibited the subject four times, twice at the Norwich Society of Artists (1824, no, 94 and 1829, no. 132) and twice with the Old Water-colour Society (1825, no. 105 and 1831, no. 105)

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